Defining my Higher Power

I have been having this dialogue about faith. The dialogue takes place in my mind, but is shared by many in my waking life. I have heard snippets in church, and work, in facebook, and from friends. Mostly what they say is the same. To quote al-anon and the twelve steps faith is “improving my conscious contact with God, as I understand him.” I find this answer fairly satisfying because it resonates with my personal spiritual growth. That is, I find that as I grow spiritually my awareness of the presence of God, however defined, grows. I worry thought that my definition of God is somehow tied to the idea of spiritual growth and that perhaps I am being redundant. It is hard for me to think of spiritual growth without God. I find myself asking the question can there be spiritual growth in the absence of God? The closest answer I can come to of an example of spiritual growth without God is in acts of charity or compassion. I say this because I think that a true act of charity or compassion is strongest when it is done without ulterior motive and that it is only a true act of charity when it is done without expectation of reward.

Interestingly the more I think about acts of compassion the more I realize that in practicing compassion I look to God for strength and direction. Perhaps this is why I began asking myself a deeper, more personal question that is dominating this inward dialogue of faith. It is hard to define exactly what this deeper question is exactly, or even how I struggle with it. I think it is safe to say that I am going through a transformation of belief and that I am unsure about exactly what this transformation is or how it will end.

I am, for example, deeply conflicted about various representations of the cycles of the life of the spirit. I grew up being taught that we are born, we live and we die. When we die, if we were good we went to Heaven and if we were bad we went to Hell. As I got older I began to dismiss this idea of an afterlife of duality and decided that heaven was one place, regardless of our actions and that it was our time on Earth, and what we did with it that defined our suffering. Hell was the torment that we put ourselves through on Earth. From there my beliefs took on many twists and turns. Gradually I began to accept the possibility that there was not one life but many. That we didn’t simply live and die, but that this was part of a greater cycle of birth and death. I began reading Eastern philosophies and eastern religions that shared these beliefs, and eventually I began to think that even heaven was part of this cycle of our spiritual lives, that is that we are born, we live and die, we go to heaven for a while, and then it starts all over again. Heaven is just part of the greater cycle of things.

This of course left the question of where God was in all of this and, more personally, what was my roll to be in this ever changing cycle of life. Many religions offer variations on this theme of cycles, and almost all agree that God both permeates and is outside of the circle of death and rebirth. My roll, as you might find in Buddhism or Christian Gnosticism, it to reunite myself with the divine God-head that is outside of this merry-go-round we call life. It is here that I have lived, in my spiritual growth, or perhaps more rightly defined as my spiritual belief. For what I am talking about is not really a way of living rightly with God, as much as it is a search for some definition of God that I can be comfortable with so that I can begin to live rightly with that definition.

Here, finally we come to the crux of the problem. The problem of the question that I asked in paragraph one. “Can there be spiritual growth without God?” The problem with this question being not so much that there is a right or wrong answer, yes there can or no there can’t, as the problem is with the question itself. The problem is not whether or not I can grow spiritually, but whether I can without a definition of God. Can I grow spiritually with my present definition of God? The answer for that question being yes, as long as I don’t define God too rigidly, because if my spiritual growth does not sync with my definition of God, I have, as you can see, conveniently altered my definition to better understand the nature of my growth. This has been useful because belief give me a touchstone upon which I can ground myself. The more I think this way the more I begin to distrust my definitions and begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just throw them all out, or if this isn’t the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Still I can’t help but ask myself the question, another question. What if there were no definitions? What if there were just act of compassion and charity in and for themselves? Could I remain grounded in my faith, or would faith dissolve into ego and would I become selfish and self-centered without the presence of some definition of God showing me the way? Sadly I don’t think that I trust myself enough to try and go it alone without my dictionary close at hand. Too often have I been that selfish, self-centered person that I speak of. Still it gives me comfort, in moments of spiritual crisis when my definitions have become rigid and abut my sense of spiritual growth, that it is not God, but myself that I am struggling with, and that my higher power is waiting, patiently for me to come around.

My deep driving desire

Probably everyone knows the famous passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “You are what your deep, driving desire is. 
As your desire is, so is your will. 
As your will is, so is your deed. 
As you deed is, so is your destiny.” As I lay awake near sleep the other night this thought was in my head. Though really the thought was more like “how do I know what my deepest desire is?” you can do a search on the Upanishad quote and come up with a thousand different musing on its meanings, and I don’t mean to do that here, rather as I lay there looking at myself I couldn’t help but wonder if what I desire and what I want are really the same thing.

I was listening to a radio lab episode about a month ago when they tackled a similar problem. In the episode the hosts talked about an experiment in which people were given a simple set of numbers to memorize. The subject was then asked to walk down the hall into another room and recall that set of numbers to an observer. Unbeknownst to the test subject, there was an obstacle in the way. Someone, a research assistant probably was to intercept the subject in the hallway and disrupt the subject’s train of thinking. The research assistant would ask” Would you like a piece of cake?” and then offer the subject a piece of cake. More often than not, the list of numbers was forgotten. It turns out that desire and reason are in a constant struggle for attention, and desire usually wins.

I am what my deep, driving desire is. It is weird to think, but the last thought I had as I drifted off to sleep was. I am that desire. By that, of course, I mean, if you look around at my life, at the people and the stuff that I have surrounded myself with, whatever other choices I might have made in life, these things, these people are the by-product of the decisions that won. My life is a product of my deep, driving desire.

Now I have to tell you that usually when I read this quote I read it negatively. That is, I think that if I really willed myself I could have that good job. I could have fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. Or, more rightly I think that I could have that close intimate relationship with my higher power if only I got my mind right. Did you get that? The reason, I tell myself, that I am not a good person, or a righteous person, or a holy person, or whatever, it that I don’t want it enough, and that if I were better, I would.

Self loathing thoughts like these are the by-product of years of misunderstanding between the Christian God and myself. I can blame the church or the priests or my parents… but those songs are old and tired. No I have worked long and hard to try and get my mind around the idea that God is Love, an idea shared in both the Gospels and the Upanishads. And as I lay there thinking that I am what my deep, driving desire is, and I thought about all the things in my life that I have that I am thankful for, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t my desires that made me a bad person, my desire to have things that I didn’t have, it was my deep, driving desire that made me who I am today, that gave me a wonderful life, and that was a very comforting thought, one that I could fall asleep to.

Letting Go

I have this part of me that loves to get away with stuff, and gets really indignant whenever I get caught. I hate getting caught, though not because being caught means I have to admit fault. No, I hate getting caught because it makes me angry, and that kind of angry is totally irrational. I had this kind of episode last night at my daughters swim meet. I was sitting in someone else’s spot and when they asked me to move I got crazy angry. To my credit, I didn’t show it. I moved, and then I sat in my new spot fuming and hating the woman who asked me for her chair back. It is totally crazy. I mean, any given day of the week I would offer my chair and the shirt on my back to some stranger but for some reason on this night I was hell bent on picking a fight.

It was thinking about the idea that I was picking a fight that made me realize that I have been thinking about this situation all wrong for some time. Usually I get angry and do something stupid and hate myself for getting angry. But really, where is the sense in that? That is like offering a child a piece of candy and then smacking them once they take it. No. If I really want to berate myself for anything it should have been for sitting in someone else’s seat in the first place. But of course that thought didn’t enter my head until much, much later.

When I told my wife about it she remarked that the instant had probably triggered something old, some old memory and that I was but an actor on a stage, rehearsing a part I had learned long ago. Thinking about that I tend to agree with her, but couldn’t help but wonder what was the trigger. It wasn’t getting angry, or for that matter probably not even sitting in someone else’s chair, no I suspect that the event that triggered the whole episode probably started further back, possibly when I first entered the building, or in the parking lot, or even on the drive to the event. The subsequent behaviors, the choosing of the seat, and the rage were all just echoes of a much larger drama that was playing itself out somewhere in my subconscious.

I have been thinking about consciousness a lot lately. Mostly because I have been thumbing my way through the Upanishads. If I had to tell you what the Upanishads were to me, I would say they are meditations on the spirituality of consciousness where consciousness it like a spider’s web. You pluck one string and the whole thing is set into motion. Your mind is drawn, like the spider to its prey, and you find yourself in perfect pantomime going through the same old motions.

You know it is thinking like this that really gets me hating my brain. I think about it like some hateful insect but in fact I suspect my mind is actually trying to help me. We go through motions that are painful and distressing, but most likely we are doing this not so much because we are always doing it the same, but because we hold out the hope of someday doing it differently. Someone once told me that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. I suppose that were true if we never thought about it and just blindly stumbled along the treadmill. But the insanity stops the moment we stop turning a blind eye, and the harder we look at ourselves, the harder it is to do the things that we do without wondering why it is we do them at all, and slowly, little by little we catch ourselves and stop doing them all together. Last night I got horribly angry, but instead of tearing my night apart I gave up my seat, muttered under my breath for a while, and then let it all go.

Meditation

While jogging at the gym I often times bring my Ipod with me and listen to podcasts. Over the years I have listened to a variety of podcasts ranging in topics from history and science, to talk radio and pop culture. One of my favorite podcasts is of a WNYC radio program called Radio lab. I enjoy the program because it takes fairly complex topics like physics or psychology and attempts to break them down into simple easy to understand terms. Frequently the program will feature interviews from specialists and laymen alike giving the show a kind of “everyman” feel. The other day I was listening to the program titled “Words” in which the show discusses the idea of a world without words. One of the segments featured a neurologist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a broken blood vessel in her head. The “blood vessel burst inside her left hemisphere, and silenced all the brain chatter in her head. She was left with no language. No memories, just sensory intake.”

As fascinating as her story was, I couldn’t help but compare her experience to descriptions of the meditative state of mind that is often described in the Hindu Vedas and Buddhist texts. “The Sanskrit word véda "knowledge, wisdom" is derived from the root vid- "to know".” They are, at least in my opinion, the record of centuries of reflection by ancient Indian scholars and mystics on the question of the human experience, or, if you will, what is the meaning of life, at least in the way the noted American scholar Joseph Campbell once described it: “People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life... I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Interestingly, in describing her experience, Jill Bolte Taylor suggested that in losing her ability to ascribe language or words to things, she found herself instead experiencing “an all encompassing feeling of joy.“ Words she suggested, kept her at bay from the world, separate and isolated. When she lost her capacity to ascribe words to things she said she felt closer to them, as if she were apart of all things. I have to admit this idea intrigued me. For in meditation the goal is often to silence the inner chatter, to suspend the “self” and to get one to stop differentiating between self and other. In a sense, meditation is about finding that connection that Mrs. Taylor had thrust upon her. When asked, which did she prefer, the world of silent joy, or the world of words, her response was a quiet “I don’t know.”

For me the idea that the chatter in my head could go silent, that I could rid myself of the little voices that crop up and keep an almost constant running monologue of life seems like a gift too good to be true. While my voices can be sweet and sincere, they can also be insecure and mean. I have often struggled to understand the value or importance of meditation, but this show has given me an insight into the idea that in meditation I could somehow separate myself from that thread of jabbering prattle that follows me wherever I go. I mean, I have often thought about meditating, but really I never understood what it was for. I have to admit I had a kind of “what’s in it for me” attitude. Listening to this show I suddenly found myself with a sense of wonder and direction that has opened meditation to the world of possibility.

“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.” - Buddha

One of the most common threads in the Vedas is the idea of conquering the "self." You can read yards of pages that seek to describe what this notion of "self" is. There are as many interpretations of the "self" as there are selves making them. However in many of these text to which I refer,the self is the still calm deep that one strives for in meditation. It is the absence of the running monologue, and the opening of the mind to a purely sensory intake of the world of experience. In short, it is the experience described by Mrs. Taylor.

When I was younger I used to think of the "self" as the "soul." But my understanding of what the "soul" is could only be conceived of in esoteric terms. That is, if I had a soul it was somehow something "other" and not really related to anything in this world. I think a big part of my spiritual growth has been to let go of any preconceived idea of "self" or "soul" and rather strive for connection and compassion as a way of experiencing that nature of soul that I could not otherwise imagine. It is a little frightening to think that this notion of "self" is derived from a pure sensory experience of the world. I mean that pretty much puts the esoteric idea of soul out of the picture. No body, no self. No Self, no soul. No soul... what then? Still, part of setting aside my preconceived notions of "self" and "soul" is setting aside the fears and doubts that go along with those old ideas. For now at least I want to try and focus on that feeling of connectedness, without necessarily worrying about what is in it for me.